But it stops clearly short of roflmao, I infer?

Roflcopter?

Albuquerque New Mexico...

IYKYK

It's just a special case of TANSTAAFL.

My CLAUDE.md file bloated significantly. It tried to load unnecessary skills and would retain throughout the whole session. Fixing that, maintaining good wikis and using clear often really helped fixed my personal token burn.

I switched to caveman on Claude Code. It cuts the token count; it's the same output, and it appears to me to be faster as well.

You mean those workflows that could've been traditional scripting and CI/CD, if not for management forcing AI into them? Those workflows?

"Sorry boss, quota resets this evening at 8. See you tomorrow!"

"But it's 9am!"

*shrugs* "Quota. Got none. Seeya."

They love money. AI was good money for a while. Or at least it looked like good money until you looked at it for longer than 3 seconds, which greatly surpasses the average attention span of an executive. And also the average executive's iq.

They loved it too much and now it costs more than paying a living wage to a human being. The end goal of AI was always to cut cost and layoff people. The best sabotage right now is to setup a script that constantly prompts an LLM for something useless. I would recommend it if it didn't waste so much energy and clean water. But it would send a message. AI is not cheaper, it never was. Even with today's outrageous token prices, LLM companies are still bleeding money per user. It will only get more expensive as data center contracts fall through and the investment craze fizzles out.

Mixed bag.

There are legitimately high value problems that AI works well against. But ungoverned proliferation has a net negative ROI across complex and difficult to measure areas.

When applied expertly, it works great. When blindly handed to your entire workforce as a panacea, not so much

Someone's been reading the HR posters.

Itd have to be some kind of bubble and that would mean we were in a lottttt of danger and should reasses our use of it.

Well yeah, but if it were the only sector propping up the whole economy and we reassessed it, the economy would be in a loooooot of danger anyway.

Luckily, that would never happen...

Heh, re ass.

Imo its because people will lazily ask the llm to remove or change simple code instead of doing it themselves

...said every day now for a year

Hopefully it will reset public consciousness and at least reduce the insane hero worship we give the executive class. These people aren't geniuses, they tend to not even be particularly clever, just well connected. Maybe this will be the abject reminder people need that these idiots are generally still just idiots and are not in fact 10,000% more valuable than the guy who sweeps the floors and keeps the bathrooms clean.

I know. Wishful thinking. A guy can dream though.

The problem is that, when the bubble pops, they'll just say they are too big to fail. They'll take your tax money to keep them alive and those nice CEO anual bonuses coming. They always win, either way. The game is just rigged.

Im drooling over that idea

Who needs PRs? What's a branch? It defaults to master and that seems to work just fine!

If you run "agentic coding harness" or any kind of goal oriented loop then tokens goe brrrr.

And LLM sellers are pushing for that (duh), as they managed to convince people to use infinite monkeys typewriting until they make Hamled.

(Type made on purpose)

A big context costs a lot more

Some companies had leaderboards and encouraged AI usage until they got their bills.

I do it on purpose

If you click the most expensive model and then click max/fast mode, the same task can easily cost 10 or 20x of the cheaper models

I read they were automating everything whether it needed AI or not just to get credit for using AI.

I am not able to use the tokens provided by a Claude Max account either.
But if someone tries to be clever and have 10 employees use a single Max account, they probably run into the limits often. And if the response is to let them just buy API-prized tokens instead of getting more accounts, that gets very expensive very fast. The single-user accounts are subsidized. The extra token prices are not.
Actual business accounts are prohibitively expensive. And at least Anthropic terminates subsidized accounts when they see extensive use.

Real token prices are insane. Most businesses couldn't afford them. And eventually the VC capital will dry up. The cheap AI bubble will burst. And then the market is in for a real sticker shock.
Better be prepared to switch to local inference for as many use cases as possible.

I've heard "loops" will burn a lot of tokens. Haven't tried it myself. A person could also spool up multiple loops to work on multiple branches at the same time.

I tried Warp terminal because now that's bankrolled by openai's magic infinite money you can use your own openai api keys without a subscription. So I put one from my work account. I do a git commit (manually) and then it comes a prompt under it "push it, open a PR and switch to main?". I click yes, it used one million tokens for that... (And it took about a minute because it did like 20 requests, so there was no time saving at all vs doing it manually)

I wget something, it comes a prompt under it "now compare the hash?". Boom, another 500k tokens

Agent loops for SWE burn a LOT of tokens.

I'm unfortunately temporarily disabled and can't use my hands for another 2 months. So I've leaned heavily into AI based workflows to keep my job in the meantime.

Aside from the nightmare of keeping quality high, not atrophying skills, and avoiding a lack of domain knowledge. It works reasonably okay.

Token usage is insane though. A productive day might cost a few hundred dollars in tokens all things considered. Quality is expensive as well, a good 1/4 of that are automated systems that exist to identify defects, quality, coherence....etc issues early.

What are you using? Which product? I got 2k last month and was told to use cheaper models indeed

This is a good explanation

AI bubble popping is that gif of the crash test truck.